Everybody’s Doin’ What?

As I prepare to teach various classes about ragtime (and its roots), I’ve returned to Dale Cockrell’s recent book, Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music, and Dance in New York, 1840-1917 (Norton, 2019). It’s a revelatory peek at the roots of popular music and dance in the public houses, dives, brothels, and concert saloons of New […]

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Listening to the Sound of Culture

Last summer I was invited by Small Axe, a journal I have long wanted to write for, to take part in a book discussion of Louis Chude-Sokei’s engrossing, ambitious The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics. I’ve enjoyed Chude-Sokei’s perspectives on dancehall, Nigerian 419 scammers, and Bert Williams for years, and I was already […]

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Get on the Good Foot

The following piece was published in December 2016 in The Wire‘s special issue, Spirits Rejoice: Sacred Songs, Divine Drones, and Ritual Rhythms (#394). I was excited by the call for pitches because I’ve been connecting lots of dots in my music history courses at Berklee between sacred and secular traditions, and I’ve become more and […]

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¡Antigua Vaina!

This mix amplifies the resonances between the music of 19th century composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk and the bedrock rhythm of reggaeton and a great deal of recent pop music — a/k/a, dembow. As much a tribute to Gottschalk’s faithful fantasias as to the numerous architects of dembow aesthetics, we hear in their juxtaposition how one […]

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The African Americas Project & the Mystery of Dem Bow

I’m headed down to the University of Delaware tomorrow for “The African Americas Project,” a two-day symposium bringing together quite a mix of artists, musicians, and scholars to explore the connections between Latin America, the Caribbean and the US. For my part, I’ll be talking about “Reggaeton’s Afro-American Address,” by which I mean the ways […]

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Social Media & Electro Diasporas

This Saturday I’ll be at Cornell, speaking on a panel alongside some esteemed colleagues. The subject at hand is, more or less, the animating force behind this blog in recent years: “(post-)regional dance musics and their transformation through the internet” — The students organizing the event have an ambitious agenda for digging deeper into this […]

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big gyptian (riddim meth0d repost)

[Ok, here’s another oldie-but-goodie from the Riddim Meth0d vaults. Plenty of readers are no doubt familiar with this post/mashup, especially since I’ve revisited the issue. In the time since I wrote it (almost 5 years ago!), I’ve also had the strange fortune of submitting a brief report — about the significance of “Big Pimpin” to […]

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Loo$e Change, Tight Flick

I enjoyed this so thoroughly yesterday that I need to post it here. Thanks to Frank Roberts for the tip. Becca called this 15 minute film “pitch perfect,” and I think she’s right. Hope you dig this as much as we. Someone needs to give Mykwain Gainey the resources to produce a series or something, […]

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Hit Dat ___

Not sure what to make of the casual misogyny (metaphor?) at the heart of this — a generalizing of hoe — but, that aside (if I may), I gotta say that I can’t get enough of dudes dancing lithely on their front lawns (wait for 1:10 in the video below). Apparently, this joint’s on some […]

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Now That’s What I Call Music Industry

@noz sez sometimes RT can mean “real talk”; here it’s both re: Lil B (RT @noz): The 19 year old Pack frontman currently maintains 114 myspace pages (not accounting for the “SECRETE” [sp] pages he hints at in blog posts) all launched over roughly the last eight months and each showcasing five or six original […]

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Are You African-American?

from a blog and forthcoming documentary re: “How rapid immigration from Africa and the Caribbean is transforming the African American narrative” (via) — The Neo African Americans @ Yahoo! Video

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See, Saw, Seen

The Best Recordings of 2008: Sasha Frere-Jones: Online Only: The New Yorker i <3 SFJ for sentences like this — "The song is rooted in the jiggling rhythms of James Brown, the motherlode for sampling producers from the eighties, and now entirely irrelevant to any rap being made in New York, Atlanta, Rio, or Miami." […]

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Palingenetic Ultranationalism

The Elephants Child: ring ring ring rachel re: ring tones, txt speak, & refurb'd nokia nat'lism (tags: cellphones video global nation language blogpost) ffm713's blog – FFM presents The Pen & Pixel Madhouse – Skyrock.com 73 pages of pen&pixel rap album covers (via noz) (tags: hip-hop art design album gangsta) Palingenetic ultranationalism – Wikipedia, the […]

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Tabula Rasta

EBONYJET | Whose Tube: Doing For Self or The Cyberground Railroad: Part 2 "We are taking this cyberground railroad to new celebrity, much like our cousins worldwide. Youtube has become a place to 'get a rep,' for some to use as a stepping-stone to other things. But for some, and maybe most of us, it […]

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Just May Be

I’ve been on a serious YouTube grind over the last couple weeks, working up a couple papers/talks on black digital youth culture. Check the waxtube or my favorites to sink into a pixelated dance trance. Gave one version of this black-digi-youf chat a couple weeks ago at Harvard, which thx to a little bird tweet, […]

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Beet Street

todo mundo » Blog Archive » Busta learns from Ice-T, takes cue from Soulja Boy, T-Wayne kevin offers some incisive analysis of busta's hopping the dance craze train :: 'Should he reach out to Cash Camp and do a video with them or can Busta claim to be just another node in the teen dance […]

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Cogito Ergo Cogito Sum

Confessions of an Aca/Fan: MySpace and the Participation Gap "There's a huge gap between what you can do when you've got unlimited access to broadband in your home and what you can do when your only access is through the public library, where there are often time limits on how long you can work, when […]

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YouTube, America, Distinguished Guests, Crumbs…

Spannered | Bobby Corridor | Hip Hop Megamix | Radio oh my god yes oh my god :: golden age beat madness and beyond! :: 600+ tracks in 90 minutes :: mixxtape of the summerrrrrrrr, for really tho (tags: hip-hop mix instrumentals production mp3) YouTube – Soulja Boy SHOCKING News! OMG WTF LOL! "youtube … […]

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